What about subtitles & closed captions? I see in one of your comment replies that you’ve uploaded transcripts of your videos but looks like Youtube has 1 spot for transcripts and another for subtitles/CC. Have you tested both transcripts and subtitles/CC? Also, I know the difference between subtitles and CC but there doesn’t appear to be anyone that’s tested once vs the other. Might be something to test.
Quick question: You say you don’t recommend payed views (i.e. fiverr) which is understandable for various reasons. However, would you say that if you start from scratch (no social network whatsoever and a brand-new video) it could be beneficial to buy maybe 2,000-5,000 views, a bunch of likes/subscribers/etc. just to get it started and then let it grow organically?
Just for the record I make a substantial living from YouTube marketing and I also run my own SEO firm with over 250 clients with Google Front Page Rankings. Now I use Fiverr for my YouTube rankings and I agree with Brian but would also like to add a little more value. After you do what Brian suggest visit Fiver and find someone that dripfeeds views for 20 days. 100 views a day for 20 consecutive days works wonders with the right backlink profiles. I’ve ranked for several medium competition keywords without any backlinks. Google will rank your video with social signals from just YouTube. Here is my formula 100 likes, 50 comments, 10% dislikes, 100 subscribers driven from the video, 50 video embeds and about 250 Facebook shares and likes, then build backlinks. There is a link to my Youtube channel feel free to Google search any of my keywords.
7) Social Engagment - Likes, Comments, and social shares are the name of the SEO game. If you have a high likes to dislikes ratio then Youtube will favor your video so the goal is to get as many likes as possible and as many comments as possible. I'm not going to go into detail here as I cover this in this "Youtube VIDEO SEO" tutorial so pay close attention to the end of the video.

Google’s aim is to provide the most relevant result for any given query. Their entire business model relies on them being able to do this, consistently, across hundreds of billions of searches. For that reason, they’ve invested heavily into understanding the intent of queries, i.e., the reason a person typed a specific thing into Google in the first place.